Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of toxic waste a year. An investigation shows how it could be making workers sick and contaminating communities across America
, saying it downplayed the radioactive gas radon, misinterpreted information on radium, and ignored the well-documented risks posed by the inhalation or ingestion of radioactive dust.
Ted Auch, an analyst with the watchdog group FracTracker Alliance, estimates there are at least 12,000 brine trucks operating in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. He says he has never seen one with a radioactivity placard. “There are all sorts of examples for how often these things crash,” says Auch. In 2016,on a bad curve in Barnesville, Ohio, dumping 5,000 gallons of waste.
Officials found the creek in the Lupo incident to be “void of life” after the contamination, prosecutors said. But downstream, no one notified water authorities or tested water supplies for possible radioactivity, says Silverio Caggiano, a near 40-year veteran of the Youngstown fire department and a hazardous-materials specialist with the Ohio Hazmat Weapons of Mass Destruction Advisory Committee.
Brine-spreading is legal in 13 states, including the Dakotas, Colorado, much of the Upper Midwest, northern Appalachia, and New York. In 2016 alone, 11 million gallons of oil-field brine were spread on roads in Pennsylvania, and 96 percent was spread in townships in the state’s remote northwestern corner, where Lawson lives. Much of the brine is spread for dust control in summer, when contractors pick up the waste directly at the wellhead, says Lawson, then head to Farmington to douse roads.
“Not much research has been done on this,” says Bill Burgos, an environmental engineer at Penn State who co-authored a bombshellthat examined the health effects of applying oil-field brine to roads. Regulators defend the practice by pointing out that only brine from conventional wells is spread on roads, as opposed to fracked wells.
Mansbery said that he tested for heavy metals and saw “no red flags.” Asked if he tested for radioactive elements, he stated, “We test as required by the state law and regulatory agencies.” “A truck carrying brine for injection is the worst,” says Ohio fire chief Silverio Caggiano. “Drivers don’t have to have a single piece of paper telling me what they are carrying. It scares the f— out of me.” Photograph by George Etheredge for Rolling Stone
To store radioactive waste, or recycle, treat, process, or dispose of brine and drill cuttings, companies simply submit an application that is reviewed by the chief of the ODNR. They’re called “Chief’s Order” facilities, and Ohio has authorized 46 of them. Companies have to submit a radiation protection plan as part of the application, and ODNR spokesman Steve Irwin says all facilities are inspected regularly. But worker protections and knowledge of the risks still seem to be lacking.
“These guys are so proud of their jobs,” says Weatherington-Rice, the Ohio-based scientist, “and they’re working with this stuff and they go home and they’ve got this on their clothes — they can end up contaminating their family as well. This is how this stuff works.” Neither Veolia nor Antero replied to questions on whether they were testing the steam for radioactivity. When asked if the agency was monitoring for such things, West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection official Casey Korbini said, “The WVDEP permits are in accordance with federal and state air-quality statutes, and radionuclides are not a regulated pollutant under these statutes.” He added, “This does not mean that radionuclides are prohibited; they are simply not regulated.
A 2013 report co-authored by Resnikoff calculated that sending solid oil-and-gas waste like drill cuttings to a low-level radioactive-waste facility could mean as much as a, so there’s an incentive for companies to get the waste into a regional landfill. There are at least five landfills in West Virginia that accept drill cuttings, at least five in New York, 10 in Ohio, and 25 in Pennsylvania. Most of the drill cuttings are from fracking and can be radioactive.
But in May, a county judge ordered the landfill to stop sending the sewage plant its leachate. And there are risks even when there’s a large body of water to dilute the contamination: A 2018 study found that in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny River, oil-and-gas waste was accumulating in the shells of freshwater mussels.
A 2016 lawsuit by environmental groups forced the EPA to reassess its monitoring of oil-and-gas waste, which it had not done since before the fracking boom. But in 2019 the agency concluded “revisions…are not necessary at this time.”
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